It is curious that the name of Mary Jeune, society hostess and social reformer, luminary of the Victorian era, has received relatively little critical and scholarly attention. 1 By the last decade of Victoria’s reign Jeune, also known as Mary Mackenzie, Mary Stanley, Lady Jeune, and Lady St. Helier, was famous across the English-speaking world. She hosted the most sought-after salon in London. A contemporary newspaper commented, no doubt with tongue in cheek, “If by any chance her house caught fire, and her guests had been burned, half the most famous names would have disappeared from the peerage. The Royal Academy would have been decimated. The theatres would have been obliged to close. The most eloquent pulpits would have been dumb. Science would have been at a standstill” (Furniss 189). Certainly her admirers and close friends included many eminent Victorians, such as Randolph and Jennie Churchill, Joseph Chamberlain, William Forster, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, George Grossmith, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, Ouida, Saki, and Edith Wharton.

However, renowned as well for her authoritative writings on social and women’s issues, published and reported on both sides of the Atlantic, Lady Jeune was no mere social butterfly. In between writing and entertaining she was occupied with many philanthropic ventures in the poorest parts of London’s East End. In the final decade of the nineteenth century she started the School Journey Association (an organization which survives to this day), delivered with her own hand many hot meals to schoolchildren, supported rehabilitation for “fallen women,” and organized Christmas stockings for destitute families, earning herself the nickname “Lady Santa Claus.” These activities informed her essay writing in over fifty contributions to such periodicals as The Fortnightly Review, The English Illustrated Magazine, and Harper’s Magazine, to name a few. It was her help that Oscar Wilde enlisted when in 1887 he took over editorship of the Lady’s Weekly, with the aim of turning it into a magazine for the thinking woman. Mary Jeune supplied him with a list of contributors that included Millicent Fawcett, Ouida, and herself. She also, incidentally, provided him with a model for The Importance of Being Earnest’s Lady Bracknell whose magisterial tones can often be detected in her writing, as for example, with Jeune’s claim that “women of the highest rank and culture have allowed the old-fashioned rules and restraints which governed society to be relaxed” (qtd. in Hughes 213). 2 Those who knew her personally, however, found her to be kind, wise, and self-effacing.

Born Susan Mary Stewart-Mackenzie in 1845, she grew up in the highlands of Scotland on the Brahan Estate, the Mackenzie family seat, near Inverness. Her grandmother Mary Frederica, chatelaine and chieftain of the clan, was living testament to the power of a curse laid on the family in the 17th century by the Brahan Seer (Jeune, “A Highland”). Most of the Mackenzie males died young and without issue; the women, by contrast, were practically indestructible. Mary’s grandmother was admired by Walter Scott and had travelled extensively in India, collecting artifacts and hunting wild animals. Her Aunt Louisa, Lady Ashburton, a vital if capricious woman, had romantic entanglements with Robert Browning and the American sculptor Harriet Hosmer.

Mary was raised in conditions of extreme austerity, never tasting chocolate until she was fifteen, and not coming to London until she was eighteen. This excessive puritanism was only partly because her parents were short of money. In 1843 they had joined the Great Disruption when four hundred and seventy ministers broke free from the Church of Scotland to establish the even more puritanical Free Kirk. This secession allied the Mackenzies with their tenant farmers against the Establishment, creating an unusual sympathy between the classes. Mary’s spartan upbringing equipped her with a fearlessness that would stand her in good stead later, whether in her travels through the Wild West of America, in her visits to the smelliest slums of Shoreditch, or in her dealings with awkward and hostile confrontations in her own drawing-room.

In 1863 she was taken to London for the “season,” so that she could meet eligible bachelors. However, she was more interested in the notable women she got to know through her family connections. One of these was Caroline Norton, the woman who single-handedly campaigned over a period of thirty years for legislation that would give married women rights over their property, their children, and their ability to initiate divorce proceedings.

In 1871 Mary married John Constantine Stanley, younger son of the 2nd Baron Stanley of Alderley. The Stanley family were famed for their argumentativeness. Mary’s mother-in-law Henrietta Stanley, a founder of Girton College, was feared by many, including her grandson Bertrand Russell “as she had a caustic tongue, and spared neither age nor sex” (Russell 32). Mary, however, delighted in her company and used it as an opportunity to sharpen her wits. Through Lady Stanley she made the acquaintance of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Millicent Fawcett, with whom she would later work in the Women’s Suffrage Movement. By marrying Johnny Stanley, Mary became sister-in-law to Henry, the 3rd Baron Alderley who, to the horror of his parents, converted to Islam at an early age, and subsequently became Britain’s first Muslim earl. She would also become great aunt to the Mitford sisters and Clementine Churchill.

Life with Johnny Stanley, a man of warring character and malicious wit, seems to have continued the process of “hardening and bracing” (St. Helier 32) which had begun in her childhood. Together they travelled through the Rocky Mountains and Utah to investigate the Emma Mine which famously swindled many British investors in the 1870s. Never a strong man, in 1878 Johnny died of Bright’s disease, an inflammation of the kidneys, leaving Mary with two small daughters. When she tried to mount a memorial for Johnny in Alderley Church, his brother Henry objected, saying “that Johnny had been a bad man, and no memorial to him should defile the sacred precincts” (Amberley Papers 24). In the dispute that ensued she employed a lawyer by the name of Francis Jeune, whom she subsequently married in 1881. Jeune, later Britain’s chief divorce judge, was a kind stepfather to Mary’s two daughters, and in 1882, they had a son, also named Francis.

In this next phase of her life Mary made a name for herself by hosting a radically heterogeneous salon. Social convention at the time was to invite only members of the landowning classes, or those who supported one’s own political party. Mary, however, selected her guests on the basis of their talent and ability. She was not afraid to mix conservatives with communists, or actresses with bishops. At a time when women had little political power, Mary Jeune exerted a good deal of invisible influence on the many politicians who dined at her house and often asked her advice on policy matters. The American author William H. Rideing, who knew her well, wrote “It was her privilege to be admitted to conferences of the leaders of public opinion at which no other women were present. Her intellectual and political influence was as great as the charm which made her salon so brilliant” (281).

Mary Jeune was subject to many of the contradictions that faced Victorians in their rapidly evolving society. Outwardly a model of the rectitude that her generation valued, she surrounded herself with people who broke all the rules. She teamed up with a left-wing journalist, Bennet Burleigh, who had had a previous career as a shipping clerk and then a pirate in the Civil War, laying torpedoes for the Confederates to disrupt Unionist shipping in Chesapeake Bay. After being captured by the Unionists he had made a dramatic escape and returned to London to write for The Daily Telegraph about conditions of working women in London’s East End, under the byline “A Friend of the Poor.” Together Jeune and Burleigh identified some of the worst slum landlords, and in 1889 filed the first successful court action against one such landlord. In the same year they established the Fair Rents for Healthy Homes League “with the aim of threatening owners of filthy property with exposure in the press” (Wise 50).

Thomas Hardy became a close friend and would stay with her whenever he was in London, where his conversations with Mary and Francis proved a direct influence on his writing, particularly in his construction of Sue Bridehead’s character and her dilemmas in his 1894/1895 novel Jude the Obscure. Hardy noted in his diary that “Mary Jeune says that when she tries to convey some sort of moral or religious teaching to the East-end poor, so as to change their views from wrong to right, it ends by their convincing her that their view is the right one – not by her convincing them” (qtd. in Florence Hardy 272).

As William Davis has noted, Mary Jeune was among those who first used the term “new woman,” coining it in an essay she wrote for the National Review entitled “Women of To-day, Yesterday, and To-morrow” (191). The term was taken up by Sarah Grand, Ouida, Mona Caird, and others, and debated with increasing gusto throughout the 1890s on both sides of the Atlantic. Her spirited critique of the very society to which she belonged, “London Society,” which was published in the North American Review in 1892, sparked shock and indignation all over the English-speaking world. “Luxury, ease, and comfort,” she declared, “are the watchwords of a large part of society in London, and they are undermining our society as surely as they sapped that of Rome” (606).

Her sympathies clearly lay with the less advantaged members of society. To her, the New Woman was a spoilt and selfish member of the privileged classes, threatening the very fabric of society. At this time The English Illustrated Magazine published her “Competition and Co-operation among Women,” an article denouncing employers who overworked their female staff while keeping them at starvation wages. Mary was an ardent supporter of women’s education, employment, and suffrage, and of the freedom brought by the bicycle. Indeed, she was one of the first women in London to own a bicycle, and in 1895 contributed “Cycling for Women,” an article full of practical advice for women cyclists, to the Badminton Magazine of Sports and Pastimes. Nothing, she says, can compare “with the delicious sensation one experiences in going rapidly over a good road on a light bicycle” (407).

Always happy to help where she could, in 1898 she was approached by her friend Jennie Churchill’s son, Winston, who was desperate to get to Sudan to report on the war there. He had been rebuffed by General Sir Herbert Kitchener who hated all journalists and Churchill in particular. Using her valuable connections, within two days Mary procured Winston a commission. She did him an even greater favor a few years later by sitting him next to her great-niece Clementine Hozier at dinner, which resulted in a match of historic significance.

It was in the early 1900s that Edith Wharton got to know her. Wharton was “shy, or indifferent” to the “struggling crowd of celebrities” (Wharton 213) one might meet at Lady Jeune’s; nevertheless, they at once became fast friends, and Wharton would stay with her each time she was in London, putting up with Lady Jeune’s many mandatory lunches and dinners for the sake of her company. “What I wish to record,” Wharton says in her memoir, “is that this woman, who figured to hundreds merely as the most indefatigable and imperturbable of hostesses… had a vigorous personality of her own, and the most generous and independent character” (214).

Mary’s son Francis died of typhoid fever in India in 1904, aged only twenty-two. Her husband, devastated by their loss, died less than a year later. Shortly before his death, Francis Jeune had been raised to the peerage, and Mary Jeune was now Lady St. Helier. She retired from public debate and devoted more time to philanthropic ventures and social reform, starting an organization to provide holidays for working women, and a Domestic Servants’ Insurance Society. In 1910 she was invited by the London County Council (LCC) to become their first female alderman.

During World War I she helped organize Military Hospitals, finding time to take the wounded Canadian airman Billy Bishop under her wing. Her friendship with Churchill, and his best man Lord Hugh Cecil, helped Billy to get accepted for pilot training and he went on to become one of the most decorated fighter aces of the war, and a Canadian national hero. After the war she retired from social life, her daughter Dorothy Allhusen taking over as a hostess of brilliance. However, Mary continued to attend the LCC assiduously, campaigning for free school meals and better housing for the urban poor. For this she was awarded a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1920, followed by a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1925. She was a keen supporter of the Garden Cities Movement founded by Ebenezer Howard (Young), and in 1927, when ill health forced her to give up work, the LCC started building a garden suburb along Howard’s principles named after her. The St. Helier Estate was to re-house inner-city dwellers amidst the lavender fields of South London (“A Brief History”; Young). Before it could be completed however, Lady St. Helier died, aged 85, at her home in Portland Place, the same house where, a quarter of a century earlier, she had hosted Winston Churchill’s wedding breakfast.

Amy Fletcher and Camilla Dinkel are sisters whose interest in Lady Mary Jeune began with the simple fact that she was their great-great grandmother. As children, they shared Jeune’s childhood experience, spending their summer holidays on the Brahan Estate near Inverness. Their childish signatures can still be seen in the estate’s visitor’s book alongside those of their great-great grandmother’s illustrious visitors. Camilla Dinkel’s background is in consumer journalism, publishing, and literature promotion. She lives in the west of Ireland where she runs the Ponc Press and the Dingle Bookshop. In the Wake of St. Brendan: From Dingle to Iceland, her translation of Danny Sheehy’s Iomhramh Bhréanainn, was published by An Sagart in 2017. Amy Fletcher has compiled and edited two family memoirs and is at work on a novel. Their searches through family albums, letters, and contemporary accounts reinforced for them Lady Jeune’ s remarkable character. They are currently writing a biography of Lady Jeune, knowing that their extraordinary relation’s story is one that deserves to be told.

Notes

1 William A. Davis has been particularly scrupulous in pointing out the degree to which New Woman studies have overlooked Lady Jeune’s prominent role in late-Victorian social, cultural, and political life and her prolific publications in the period’s periodicals. See also Kristine Maruzi who, like others, includes Lady Jeune in her discussion of the Victorian periodical press. Maruzi lists Jeune among those leading women figures of the time who contributed articles to Frederick Atkins’s magazine The Young Woman which began in 1892.

2 The original context for the pronouncement is Lady Jeune’s 1892 article “London Society,” which appeared in The North American Review and which we discuss later in our essay.

Works Cited and ConsultedThe Amberley Papers: The Letters and Diaries of Lord and Lady Amberley, edited by
Bertrand Russell and Patricia Russell, Hogarth P, 1937.

Ethel Kate Dickens was an entrepreneur in London’s literary world from the late 1880s until the 1930s. She opened a typewriting establishment in 1887 and produced clean typescripts for law offices and other professional clients, though she came later to specialize in typescripts for writers, actors, and playwrights (Stevens 189; “Type-Writing Offices II” 26). Dickens’s most famous clients included Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, J. M. Barrie, and W. S. Gilbert, among others. Indeed, Ethel Dickens is likely one of the only people to have read the original version of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray before it was censored by the editorial team at Lippincott’s, as it was her office that produced the typescript sent to the magazine (Frankel 50; “Type-Writing Offices II” 26).

From its earliest days, Dickens’s business provided work for many women, including some of her sisters. Her office was known for its efficiency, accuracy, and its fair treatment of its clerks. As “Chips,” an article published in the North-Eastern Daily Gazette in 1890 crows,

Miss Ethel Dickens says that her typewriting business has doubled itself since she started, not three years ago. She finds regular employment for eight women now, and six of them earn on average 25s. a week. The working hours are from nine till half-past five. A full hour and a half is taken out of that time for meals. Miss Dickens doesn’t sweat her clerks. (4)

Slight variations of this description of Dickens’s business practices appeared in newspapers around the globe and across the English-speaking world; some included, verbatim, Chips’s” distinctive concluding line. It is one of many public representations of Ethel Kate Dickens’s life and work that can be found in the periodical press of the time: she was frequently written about in newspapers in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Jamaica.

It was not only Dickens’s equitable practices and successful business model – which combined technology with literary art, mechanized efficiency with sensitive and discerning reading – that made such fodder for the papers. Ethel Kate Dickens also had to grapple with the realities of her inherited celebrity status. She was the second daughter of Charles (Charley) Culliford Boz Dickens and Elizabeth (Bessie) Evans. Charley was the eldest child of the world-famous and beloved author Charles Dickens, from whom he inherited the business interest in and eventually the editorship of the literary publication All the Year Round (Gottlieb 41-43, 135). When contemporary newspapers mentioned Ethel Dickens, they frequently identified her through reference to her grandfather. She herself is compared (implicitly and explicitly) with plucky Dickensian characters who labor for their living, and her own immense professional efforts are not uncommonly represented as the pale remnants of the Inimitable’s own literary accomplishments. For instance, a 1902 feature called “Here and There” in the Boston Evening Transcript, describes Ethel Dickens’s “typewriting establishment” as reaching “a plan almost worthy to be called artistic” with a rhetorical emphasis on the “almost” (27). It may be impressive in some fashion, this description implies, but the accomplishment cannot be considered equal to acts of true artistry. “Miss Ethel Dickens’ Type-writing Office,” to use one name by which she advertised her business, seems to have been at once essential to London’s literary elite yet also considered decidedly marginal to them.

Dickens’s work as a business owner and typist of literary texts illuminates the conditions of gendered labor at the turn of the twentieth century, especially as they relate to emerging technologies and traditional ideas of authority and creativity. Success in her chosen career required the seemingly disparate skills of business acumen, mechanistic precision, and subtle interpretive understanding; yet most public representations of her work seem at least equally interested in how her accomplishments reflect upon or implicitly compare to the greatness of her grandfather. Nonetheless, Ethel Dickens’s creative interpretive capacities were demonstrated further when she began to pursue her own literary ambitions, collaborating with playwright Charles Elton Openshaw on adapting Great Expectations for the stage. The play was produced in 1935 with Sir John Martin Harvey in the title role of “The Convict” (“On Stage and Screen” 138). Martin Harvey later renamed the play “The Scapegoat” and took it on tour to provincial cities across the United Kingdom (Hammond 217). Nonetheless, even in the context of her own literary creation, the ghost of Charles Dickens haunts Ethel Kate Dickens, both sustaining and circumscribing the possibilities of her personal and professional life.

But Ethel Dickens did not shy away from being known as Charles Dickens’s descendant. To the contrary, hers was a frank voice in the public conversations about her grandfather’s legacy. For example, in her 1907 interview with The Sunday Star, Dickens claimed to have found a stage adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood written by her father. She declares that her grandfather revealed the intended ending to Charley, and that Charley wished to dramatize it in his play (Brown 8). In 1908, three years before the centenary of Charles Dickens’s birth, she gave an interview to The Spokesman-Review in which she opposed the idea of a memorial statue of her grandfather on the grounds that Dickens had rejected such an idea during his lifetime (“How to Honor” 6). As these instances demonstrate, Ethel Dickens was an active public commentator about Dickens’s legacy, though whether she sought out these opportunities for publicity or only participated reluctantly is unclear from these reports. However, as the centenary of Dickens’s birth neared, the dire financial straits of four of her six sisters made her take an even more controversial public step. As Lucinda Hawksley describes it, Ethel was “forced to resort to appealing for public donations” by means of a “begging letter” addressed to Lord Alverstone (330), which was published in The Daily Telegraph. Ethel’s plea, which was supported by at least one writer for The Times, relied in part on her grandfather’s fame and the public’s love for his works. But as the writer of “A Charles Dickens Testimonial” argues, the lack of sufficient copyright protections for Dickens’s work, both during his life and after his death, suggests a “deferred royalty” was indeed due to his descendants (6). For whatever reason, Ethel’s letter was ultimately successful: enough money was collected to provide for her sisters whose health did not permit them to work any longer (“Centenary”).

Ethel herself continued to run a typewriting office and to work as a typist through the 1930s. When Ethel passed away in the spring of 1936, she was apparently writing another play (“Dickens’ Granddaughter Dies” 15). She died from complications of an overdose of sleeping pills prescribed by her doctor. The details of her death, including the open verdict of the inquest that followed, were splashed across the pages of newspapers around the world. Reports of her death openly hint at the possibility of suicide, citing her use of luminal for insomnia and sometimes mentioning an ambiguous “note” found in her apartment (“A Granddaughter of Dickens” 9). The Montreal Gazette’s account of her death ran under the headline “Ethel Kate Dickens Victim of Drug” (21), while the New York Times declared “Sleeping Potion Fatal: Dickens’s Granddaughter Took an Overdose, Coroner Finds” (5). The Times of London on May 2 gave a more in-depth description of the inquest, including testimony by Ethel’s physician Dr. Cowley, in which he reports that she declared she “would never do anything silly” with the powerful tablets she was prescribed (“A Granddaughter of Dickens” 9). This report was picked up by other newspapers, including Jamaica’s the Kingston Gleaner (“Grand-daughter of Dickens Dies”). Ethel’s death, thanks to her inherited celebrity status, became a spectacle for international consumption.

The reports were sensational enough to inspire Miss Laurence Alma-Tadema, a friend of Ethel’s, to publish a remembrance in The Times on May 4, 1936 (16). Alma-Tadema, a writer herself and the daughter of the painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, feelingly depicts Ethel’s final years as undeservedly solitary and dedicated to work. She justifies Ethel’s “recourse to sleeping-draughts” to conquer insomnia, writing that the “failing vigour of a seemingly indestructible youth, impassioned concern for the few to whom she devoted her heart, irregular hours of work, and neglect of self in a lonely home, gradually undermined her forces” (16). The public’s appetite for a potential scandal was reflected in the sensational way Ethel’s death was reported, and becomes even clearer in Laurence Alma-Tadema’s attempt to quiet the gossip through this public “Appreciation.” With perhaps the partial exception of Alma-Tadema’s obituary, Ethel’s professional achievements and personal life were overshadowed by her inherited fame and the nature of her passing in these final “public appearances” she made in the periodical press.

Curiously, Ethel Kate Dickens’s inherited celebrity status seems to have pushed her to the margins of literary history. Despite playing a significant role in the publication and production processes of well-known literary and theatrical works of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, her accomplishments were ultimately overshadowed by her family name, a name that pointedly illuminates underlying cultural assumptions about what kinds of labor truly count as “creative.” By recognizing the complexities that characterized her life and work, however, one can begin to see how her particular existence both fits and challenges some of the founding “types” through which we understand gender, creativity, and individual autonomy in the modern world.

Heidi LeLoup Penningtonis an Assistant Professor of English at JamesMadisonUniversity in Virginia. Her research and teaching interests include Victorian literature, genre studies (specifically the novel and life-writing), narrative theory, and representations of identity and selfhood. Her first monograph, Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography, was published by the University of Missouri Press in April 2018.